Review: a pen made for children in 1988
plus: koala
PROBLEM: you have six dollars and are in your forties. What can you do to alleviate the existential dread associated with aging in America with only six dollars, assuming you already have dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets?
SOLUTION: buy one of these dumb pens from 1988 but do it on Black Friday so you can get two of them instead.1
Yes: retailer Endless Pens acquired old stock of 1988-1990 Pelikan Twists and gambled that someone, somewhere, would want to buy forty-year-old fountain pens that were targeted at the youths.
And as I was One Of The Youths in 1988 and am now an adult man with six-plus dollars, here we are:
While Endless Pens goes out of their way to stress that shipping during the Black Friday rush will be slow, these arrived just five days after the order via regular mail. I am grateful that Endless has their priorities straight and got mine out to me so quickly; if you are still waiting for that $1500 limited edition pen you ordered, you know, I’m sure you can understand why they shipped my order first.
The Twist is still in production although the “Twist” concept is a lot more literally interpreted today. Here’s a comparison picture to show you what I mean:
The versions I just bought were produced between 1988 and 1990, a fact I probably did not need to tell you. My wife’s reaction to the white one was “that looks like EPCOT”:
And for the purple one: “why does it have kangaroos? Did they make that for Qantas?”
Me: “I don’t think so, but I do have a memory of Australia being very cool when I was a child.”
On that: Australia has really played a much smaller role in my adult life than I would have expected, an expectations/reality gap about on par with ninja-related crime and the Bermuda Triangle. I cannot help but wonder: why did I consume so much koala-related media as a child? And why do I know so much about boomerangs? Did Australia have the world’s most aggressive tourism board in the late 80’s?
Probably! But back to the pens.
These pens are roughly the size of the Pelikan M200, if a bit longer, and a good deal smaller than the present-day Twist.
They do not have the triangular grip of the new Twist, though, because when WE were kids you had to learn how to hold a pen the OLD-FASHIONED WAY. 2
The clips are both colorful and brittle. I imagine they would have lasted two days if I had access to these as a child.
The pens shipped with long ink cartridges. I was unclear if these were also forty years old so I decided to not risk it and put a new Pelikan cartridge in the EPCOT one, because of course you cannot use a differently-branded ink cartridge in a luxury pen like this as it could compromise the performance.
And it writes pretty good, actually!
I have not tried out the Qantas one yet, although I assume it will be even better as Endless Pens says the more advanced screenprinting debuted in 1990 and therefore Pelikan had two more years to make the pen extra cowabunga.
In conclusion: these hold up, performing like Gallant while bringing Goofus energy—truly the best of both worlds.
Other Weird Pen Blogs
Rejoice: The Legion Of Weird Pen Hobby Blogs continues to grow on Substack. Two recommendations of blogs similar to this one with authors familiar to regular commenters:
The Legion is open to considering new members; we do not have A Guy Who Talks To Fishes or A Wizard Who Is So Powerful That The Rest Of Us Are Kinda Pointless so anyone with those skills will be prioritized, but the key criterion is writing a weird pen blog (a blog about weird pens or a weird blog about regular pens or, as here, both).
Overuse of the Substack AI to make image macros that look like they are from 2007, reliance on dead meme formats, and unironic self-description as “weird” because you are Not Like The Other Hobbyists are all a plus. Apply in comments below.
technically came to ~$7 for two but then the regular price for the screenshot was $6 and overexplaining it made the joke bad so here i am in the footnotes overexplaining it
here is where we are with AI image generation right now: really bad at making people and airplanes, utterly incredible at koalas and minions
Instructions unclear, went on Endless Pens and spent $125 for a pen that’s discounted heavily which means it’s free even though I never actually wanted it
I concur on the mystery regarding the prominence that late 80’s bastardized Australian culture played in my childhood, vs barely registering a blip (outside of depressing, solo dinners at Outback on work trips in otherwise underwhelming American cities) in the hauntingly, depraved radar of an adulthood where even overpriced fountain pens can’t fill the void in my soul.